Music-based interventions could address perinatal mental health gaps for Black and mixed-heritage women

In South East London, fourteen women of African, Caribbean and Mixed heritage gave voice to what it means to become a mother inside a system that was not built with them in mind. Their accounts reveal how perinatal mental health care fails women of Global Majority ethnicities through racial bias, cultural stigma, and structural neglect — at the very moment when vulnerability is highest and the stakes, including maternal mortality, are gravest. Yet within their testimony lies a direction forward: music, community, and the radical act of being genuinely heard. This research asks not merely how t